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Overview
As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.Synopsis
As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.
Booknews
Using Hiroshima as a concrete example of the ways historians have repressed reality in order to explain events, Davis (English, Ohio State U.) challenges the basic theoretical underpinnings of both humanism and postmodernism, and in the process offers a new theory of "the tragic" as well as a new concept of how history should be written. His new theory depends on existential thinking and is grounded in psychoanalytic inquiry, and he ultimately argues that history contains the power to lead us to a new theory of the psyche. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)